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In computer science, linear search or sequential search is a method for finding an element within a list. It sequentially checks each element of the list until a match is found or the whole list has been searched. [1] A linear search runs in linear time in the worst case, and makes at most n comparisons, where n is the length of
Array, a sequence of elements of the same type stored contiguously in memory; Record (also called a structure or struct), a collection of fields . Product type (also called a tuple), a record in which the fields are not named
Locating the desired item in such a list, by the linear search method, inevitably requires a number of operations proportional to the number n of items, in the worst case as well as in the average case. Useful search data structures allow faster retrieval; however, they are limited to queries of some specific kind.
Binary, or half-interval, searches repeatedly target the center of the search structure and divide the search space in half. Comparison search algorithms improve on linear searching by successively eliminating records based on comparisons of the keys until the target record is found, and can be applied on data structures with a defined order ...
Binary search Visualization of the binary search algorithm where 7 is the target value Class Search algorithm Data structure Array Worst-case performance O (log n) Best-case performance O (1) Average performance O (log n) Worst-case space complexity O (1) Optimal Yes In computer science, binary search, also known as half-interval search, logarithmic search, or binary chop, is a search ...
However, hash tables have a much better average-case time complexity than self-balancing binary search trees of O(1), and their worst-case performance is highly unlikely when a good hash function is used. A self-balancing binary search tree can be used to implement the buckets for a hash table that uses separate chaining.
For example, the best case for a simple linear search on a list occurs when the desired element is the first element of the list. Development and choice of algorithms is rarely based on best-case performance: most academic and commercial enterprises are more interested in improving average-case complexity and worst-case performance .
The aim of a self-organizing list is to improve efficiency of linear search by moving more frequently accessed items towards the head of the list. A self-organizing list achieves near constant time for element access in the best case. A self-organizing list uses a reorganizing algorithm to adapt to various query distributions at runtime.